Design and fabrication of low power GaAs/AlAs resonant tunneling diodes

A very low peak voltage GaAs/AlAs resonant tunnelling diode (RTD) grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) has been studied in detail. Excellent growth control with atomic-layer precision resulted in a peak voltage of merely 0.28 V (0.53 V) in forward (reverse) direction. The peak current density in forward bias is around 15.4 kA/cm2(± 7%). As for reverse bias, the peak current density is around 22.8 kA/cm2(± 4%) which implies excellent scalability. In this work, we have successfully demonstrated the design and fabrication of a GaAs/AlAs RTD by using a conventional optical lithography and chemical wet-etching with very low peak voltage suitable for application in low dc input power RTD-based oscillators.